MBA1177 How To Validate a Course Before You Create It + Free Ride Friday!

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Hey everybody. Today is Free Ride Friday so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free Ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. This month we're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. It's a $500 value over at EasyCourse Co, but it's yours to grab for free. If you leave us an iTunes rating and review, you automatically enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that easy and it's our way to say thanks for showing us love on itunes. Alright, let's jump into today's episode. Heyo. Welcome to the $100 NBA show. Because there's no shortcuts in business, but there are less bumpy roads. That's why we deliver practical daily lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you'll learn how to validate your online course before you create it. How to make sure that you create a course that people actually want to buy. In today's world, information is key and being able to provide somebody a Way to learn something, to get something done in an efficient manner is something that people are happy to pay for. I know I've spent my fair share of money buying courses to learn new things. So there's nothing worse than spending months creating your own online course, the platform, all that stuff and then launching to crickets. You want to make sure your course, your topic, what you deliver is something that people really want and need and are willing to pay money for. That's the key. So how do we validate that idea before we create? That's what we get into today. I'm going to give you a step by step plan. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. One of the reasons why online courses are so valuable is is that it's curated information. It's one place that I can go, I can start here and end here and get an end result. There's so much information out there with YouTube, blogs and other sites that it gets overwhelming. People can watch small, short videos, but they don't really accomplish anything. They don't know which videos to watch, which ones are more important, what order to watch them in, and they don't have guidance along the way. And that's why people love buying online courses. That's why you'll see online courses that sell for as much as $10,000. You might be thinking, why would I buy a course for $10,000? Well, there's value in it. If I sold you a course that showed you how to create your own mobile apps, you can build a whole career on that. People spend more on a semester in College than $10,000. So hey, people are happy to pay the money if they're going to get an roi. But your job as a course grader is to make sure that you're addressing a serious pain point and making sure that you're creating a course that people actually want and are willing to pay money for. So in today's episode, I'm going to give the example of basketball coaching. Let's say I'm a basketball coach and I'm going to create a course on how to become a better basketball player if you're 30 or above. So this is not for young kids. This is for weekend warriors, people that are trying to just get better at beating their friends at basketball. So already I'm getting very niche. I'm not trying to build a course for everybody. I'm trying to find a niche audience that's looking for a course that can help them with a specific goal. Now why am I gonna do this well because if I get specific it's gonna be very hard for them to find an alternative to that course. They're gonna say, this is exactly what I need. I'm 40 years old, I'm playing basketball on the weekends at the park and I wish I can just improve my jump shot or my defense and then, and hey, maybe even increase my vertical by a couple inches. I'm just looking for some serious bragging rights and that's a strong emotion. You really want to be able to use that. Now before I start rolling up my sleeves and creating an online course on this topic with video after video and module after module, I need to make sure that people actually want this course. Are people actually willing to pay? So I'm going to do what's called a pilot. People do this all the time in TV where they create one episode of a concept for a TV show and see how people respond to. We're gonna do the same thing for our course. So I'm gonna create one specific lesson, one specific actual mini course. I'm gonna make it no longer than two hours and I'm gonna focus on one specific aspect of this bigger course that I'm imagining in my head that I wanna create and sell. So let me just choose something that would be in that course and let's just say jump shooting, you're gonna be able to shoot better. Now these are weekend warriors. They don't have a lot of time, they have full time jobs, they have families, they have commitments, they. So I'm going to create a course that shows them some drills they can do to improve their jump shooting. In six hours. It's going to be a series of drills they're going to do over a series of days. And by the end of that, the next time they play their buddies, they're going to be shooting the lights out, they're going to be doing a whole lot better. So I'm going to outline this course and again, this is really just a lesson in showing them what they're going to do in these six hours. Now this course is only going to be two hours, but I have to charge because this is where the rubber meets the road. I have to see if people are actually going to buy. Now you want to make this as enticing as possible, but at the same time make it not too expensive. So what we're going to do is one, we're going to charge $20 for admission. $20 is really affordable for a one time course. For a specific thing that's like going out to the movies, it's really nothing. And two, we're gonna make this live. We're gonna make the course live so people can ask questions. This is gonna create some buzz and we can easily do this with a live webinar. And if you're looking for a platform Shameless plug webinar Ninja is a great platform for running live webinars. It's my company and you can do paid webinars easily with our stripe integration. But this is where the rubber meets road. You're gonna see if people are willing to pay money, whether emailing our list or, you know, talking to your friends and family. Can you get 2 people, 5 people, 10 people to buy this course and give you some feedback on what they like about it and what they don't like about it? This is great because you're going to need these testimonials when you build the course out and build your sales page all out if you're going to go ahead with this course, if there's a good response. Now, people are going to love this because one, they're going to get to interact with you live, ask questions. Two, they're going to get the instruction live from you on camera. Three, you're going to give them the replay included with the price that they have access to that course whenever they want. So even if they missed the live or for example, they didn't have a chance to write down every single piece of information or note, they can review it over and over as much as they like. It's so important for you to actually sell the course with an actual price tag. Now how do you get people to buy that course? Well, you have to actually invite them and make an offer. You need to sell the course, actually, you have to actually market it. So this is where a pre webinar is all about. You're going to run a webinar that sells the course. You're gonna do a mini workshop, 30 minutes on the topic that you're talking about and you can touch on some of the things that you're gonna be covering in the course, like your form, like your follow through, like visualization when you're shooting the basketball and then you can give a demo of what the course is all about and then make the offer so they can buy the course, that live course we're talking about. So you can do this webinar free of course, and you can invite people via social media, your email list, your friends and family. This is a total free admission webinar. Again, this is a separate webinar that's free. And on that webinar, you offer the paid webinar. That's $20. Now you run the webinar. You make your offer, say, hey, I'm doing this live training. It's going to be $20. We're going to be covering this. People sign up for that training. They pay you $20 for it. You get a positive response. Now, you know the course has legs. People are responding. You have people willing to pay for this course. You might be saying, well, how do I know? What results do I need to. To know if I should go ahead? Well, I like the 10% rule. Go with the 10% rule, which means, well, 10% of the people that are exposed to the course in detail buy the course. So say, for example, you have 50 people join your free webinar. That's all about talking about the course and giving them some tips. If five people buy the course from those 50, you have their full attention. And they saw your sales page, and they bought that $20 course, that live webinar, that live training, I say that's a win. Anything more than that, anything 10% or more means the course is a winner. If it isn't, it means it needs tweaking. And usually it means you need to get a little bit more specific on what you're teaching or you need to add a bit more value to the actual course, More information, more beef. Okay, let's say, for example, your course is a winner. You're doing great. All signs say go now. You have validation. You have feedback. You have testimonials. Now you can flesh out that longer course. Now, beware. Don't feel the need to make this course as big as possible. You want to make sure it's as brief as possible. People love brevity. They love being able to understand something, learn something in a short amount of time. The more is not the merrier when it comes to content. You want to make sure you're covering all the aspects of what you need to deliver, but at the same time, do it as efficiently as possible. So if you can deliver and a $500 course in 10 videos, that comes with a workbook and a community that's supportive on Facebook or your own forum, great. If you have to do in 20, fine. But I'd be wary if you own over 50 or 60. People are not gonna be able to consume all that information. And I say 10 videos. But it all depends on the length of the video. I say keep it under two hours of video. Content. Why two hours? Well, I say many of us don't have the time to sit down and consume that kind of information in two hours is pretty much the limit. It's like a movie. I can only stand and watch a movie. Anything more than that, hey, I just don't have the time for it. So keep it under two hours.

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Wrap up today's lesson, you really, really need to validate your course idea before you start working. Why? Because you don't want to invest too much time and money and effort into something that nobody wants. That's extremely disappointing. And I've done that, Trust me. I've built courses where I had two sales. I spent months building a course and one of them was a friend of mine and the other was a chargeback, which means it was refunded. I learned the hard way so you don't have to. Okay, so validate the course with a mini course. Do it live, charge a minimal $20 and see if you get to that 10%. Thank you so much for listening, but today's episode's not over because it's Free Ride Friday. I gotta announce a winner who won the free ride to ezcourse over at Ezcourse Co. Let's see who won this week's Free ride. And the winner is. Shalia C. Shalia C. Says Avid listener, budding entrepreneur, five stars I listen to the show to gain tips to improve my business. I've implemented them and they work. They've really been a treat. In my morning commutes to work, I save the episodes and make notes in my daily growth journal. Thanks for sparking my entrepreneurial drive again. Well, thank you Chalicee for that awesome review and taking it seriously. Taking some notes. I love that. Wishing you all the best and congrats. You won our free ride. Just email me at omar@100mba net so I can hook you up with the lifetime membership to easy course, a $500 value you too can win. If you're listening, just leave us an iTunes rating interview and you automatically enter the weekly random draw. That's it for me today guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this as entrepreneurs, we get excited about our ideas. We want to go full steam ahead. As soon as the idea is hits our brains, we just think it's going to be amazing. But a smart entrepreneur knows it's not enough that you only think it's an amazing idea. Other people have to think it's an amazing idea. Other people have to be willing to pay for it. And you got to kind of curb that enthusiasm just for a bit to validate your ideas in the real world. It's going to save you a lot of time and money, so watch out for that excitement. Watch out. Don't let it overcome you and make you skip the validation process. All right, I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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